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Friday, June 21, 2013

#607: Dave Daubenmire

A.k.a. Coach Daubenmire

A.k.a. Your Friendly Neighbourhood Demagogue

Coach Daubenmire is a former high school football coach who
ran into some career trouble in the late 1990s for coercing his students to
pray. He was sued by ACLU, though according to himself “the ACLU relented and
offered Coach an out of court settlement. God honored his stand and the ACLU
backed off,” which sort of fails to mention the fact that the court ordered
Daubenmire to stop leading religious activities at school and that the school
board paid an $ 18,000 settlement. But Daubenmire is a traditional Liar-for-Jesus,
so you wouldn’t expect much honesty from that source. “As a result of the
experience, Coach heard the call to move out of coaching a high school team, to
the job of coaching God’s team,” is not entirely accurate either.

Well, Daubenmire has built his entire post-coaching career
on telling people how his first amendment rights were violated by the
Constitution, and on running the ministry he founded, Pass the Salt Ministries
(no kidding). Pass the Salt is perhaps most famous for hosting the right wing
conference “A gathering of Eagles”,
promoted as a “NON-POLITICAL event […] designed to educate Christians about the
great moral issues facing this country [,…] such as The Gay Agenda, Abortion,
Individual Liberty, Hate Crime Legislation, and the religion of Secular
Humanism,” which does not sound distinctly non-political but there you go. Guests
included several famous non-partisan Christians such as Flip Benham,
Rick Scarborough,
and Peter Labarbera.

Daubenmire also runs something called “Minutemen united”, a
group of people who disrupts church services to proclaim their anti-gay stance.
Those activities have landed him several high-profile television appearances,
where he has attempted to (chime in on the Freshwater case and) portray himself as your humble, friendly servant of God – he doesn’t hate
his opponents, you see, it is just that they are “enemies of God”. He also
advocates revolution to obliterate the distinction between church and state,
and is apparently a big fan of David Barton’s dominionist mangling of history.

Now, Daubenmire asserts that he is “not homo-phobic. I'm not
homo-hateful. I'm not homo-latent. I'm homo-nauseous. I really couldn’t care
less where a man desires to put his appendage. But I’m sick of hearing about
it. I’m sick of talking about it. I’m sick of it being force fed to me on TV,”
which would at least made slightly more sense if Daubenmire hadn’t so
tirelessly talked about it and weren’t so all-consumingly obsessed with it.
One wonders how he squares being tired of the debate with his repeated calls on
Obama to come clean and admit that he is gay (as well as admit that he is a socialist who is trying to destroy the economy
and that he is not really a Christian; Obama is apparently also a sociopath).
Then he complains that people say that he says stupid shit.

He didn’t quite get through the Jason Collins affair with
his dignity intact either. Daubenmire was predictably outraged that Obama
supported him.
He also boldly declared that he hates homosexuality, which apparently must be
consistent with being “not homo-hateful”, primarily one supposes in virtue of
the lying-for-Jesus discourse mandate he seems to possess. He furthermore
claimed that homosexuality only exists “because men like you and men like me
are letting it go on and won’t stand up and push back and say anything about
it.” Because there is surely a shortage of rabid bigots fuming about
homosexuality at the moment.

Diagnosis: Homo-hateful, abysmally ignorant theocrat. He’s
pretty loud, so he has apparently made some impact.

His condition is, in fact, rapidly deteriorating. His claim that not letting Christians bully gays is bullying against Christians (where "gays" are assumed to be opposed to "Christian", of course) is not particularly unexpected from this source. His discovery that demonic spirits are running the country is perhaps a bit further out there - more Gordo Klingenschmitt or Cindy Jacobs style.

He has came out of coaching retirement and is being announced as the new head coach of Lakewood Local School District in Hebron, Ohio. I am doing everything I can to stop this from happening, as my son plays football for this school, and I will be forced to move districts if the public does not stand up and do something. I'm backed into a corner and I am dealing with a community of good ole' boys who care more about winning games than about what this man will be brainwashing our children with !

I watched this whole event play out. It's amazing how much media attention it attracted for a small town story. You and your friends did a great job in quashing Daubenmire's being hired. But you did have a lot of help from Daubenmire himself who did STUPID things to sabotage himself like his shouty, fingerjabbing rant at the board meeting where he kept ranting even though he was told his 5 minutes were up. Then he proved himself a poor loser by blaming the pastors (?!), the gays, and personal agenda of at least one member of the school board. His ministry is a failure. To be The Great Leader he has to attract more than a small handful of followers.

As for his progress on the job market, well he's trying to put the "coach" back into his name, but things aren't going that well, it seems, which strikes him as surprising given his amiable personality but understandable given the persecution of which he is an obvious victim. We are a theocracy, proclaims the coach, and from that perspective it is absolutely appalling that a small group of gays and communists can "push around" the 80% Christians in the country (who in Daubenmire's mind opposes gays by default).